Feedforward Before You Feedback

We all understand the importance of managing and reviewing performance in the workplace, but how we look at it is changing. We used to appraise staff, set goals and review what happened at a later date. One of the problems with this is the focus on the past. What if we concentrated a bit more on the future and what might go right, rather than on a past we cannot change and what went wrong? What if we followed the Peter Drucker advice and spent time looking at our strong points and how we could use them for a more productive and successful workplace?

Well, Feedforward does just that and it works.

Feedforward is about using your best attributes and skills to achieve goals for the future, rather than concentrating on mistakes made in the past.

So how do you go about it and what are the gains for your staff and your organization? Here are some simple tips to get you going:

Feedforward Tips and Benefits

• Turn your idea about review and feedback on its head. Don’t start with assessing last year’s work or goals. Think about the future and how good it can be. Already you’ll have less of a headache!
• Communicate with your staff. Ask them to pick something they like about themselves and/or their skills and how they’d like to use it to help them in their role from now on. Work together on how to do this. Encouragement can get the best from people and improve future performance.
• Everyone, including managers, need to ask themselves about something they’d like to improve in work. You can all come up with tips for each other on how to get there. If we decide for ourselves, things we’d like to improve on, it stops us being so defensive. No recrimination, just productive ideas.
• Mentor your staff. Be a mentor, not a critic. It may sound simple, but if you work positively with someone in the workplace, you get positive results. Those that spend time coaching their staff have better productivity and staff retention levels. Career guidance is a must along the way.
• Say Goodbye to the annual review. Feedforward is about goals and the future; tomorrow and next month and the month after that. This is an ongoing process of working together, setting goals and improving all the time. Yes, you can document how you are getting on, but this is a collective exercise, that you all have a stake in, all year round.

At OMT Global we’ve been working with different companies interested in using Feedforward techniques. If you want to find out more, contact us and we’ll show you how.